... imagine: a woman with rosin on fingertips who walks along 20 meters long strings, touching them with the flesh-rosin bows, obtaining seldom heard sounds, deep, whale-like... like an huge cello, an alien organ, but producing notes and overtones mostly hinting at Nature and Its sounds...
Ellen Fullman or the miracles of Just Intonation
... you wonder "why?" I'm hinting at Ellen's music and site? I feel it to be appropriate to the period (very private matters)... to me, when I experienced her, a couple years ago, in Turin, I remember I remained zonked for a couple days after the happening... still I remember her walking, misteriously, yet simply, "inside" the instrument she conceived and built...
... the above mentioned, only hinted, "private matters" are related to current month, April... and this remind me to an extra-sensorial experience I had some years ago, when I had the rare opportunity to play a church organ... it was an old organ in an huge old church and I was accompanying a musician for a rehearsal... I simply asked: "May I?"... as I'm not an organist, I did my best, some easy bass drones with feet, some loop-like chords and some simple scales at different time-signatures... side two of Popol Vuh's "In den Garten Pharaos" in mind...
People in the church - I discovered later - tourists from Poland, remained still and in awe, following my Florian Fricke-ish elucubrations... I had great time for about half an hour... I always smile when remembering the episode: what did Polish people guess, as they bowed to me after I finished my extempore improvisation... ehmm... Die Kosmiche Kuriers in a mid-spring italian afternoon... ;-)))
... but most, MOST important than my organ adventure as a player (I'm not...), it was when, that very same afternoon, I get "inside" the organ... my musician friend played some J.S. Bach's masterpiece while I was in the mids and highs sound-chamber, in the very belly of the huge instrument... also if I heard the air-compressor, like a breathing creature, the air where I standed was still, like seconds before it rains, sounds were coming from anywhere around me, at 360 degrees, BUT they were anechoic-like, no ambience given by the church, that happened "later", "outside"... I was IN THE SOUND, swimming among notes and sounds like I never experienced before, while the bass pedal notes arrived from somewhere under and over me...
I remember it was April, and I sweated a lot in the pipes chamber... air smelled of dust, wood and paper, like in an old library... time seemed stopping.
... and life slightly changed for me, that very day of April.
Give a try to some Ellen Fullman's music, folks... it's powerful stuff, too!
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